by Nora Carroll
When she was just tiny from being born, I thought I’d call her Meg—I liked the softness of it—but she was looking reproachfully at me, waving with her tiny fists, wailing her most anguished cry, and Meg just didn’t stick to her. She had a mind of her own, and she needed a name to suit her personality. Even as a tiny baby, Margaret fit her better.
I’ll admit, I longed for a soft cooing baby, a cuddly little girl to share my lonely days. But even as a tiny one, Margaret had such strong opinions. Sometimes, when I tried to hold her, she tensed her tiny baby body as stiff as a washboard. I made her bottles of warmed-up milk with Karo syrup in it, and when she had a mind to, she would fling it right back at me, her eyes in injured slits. I used to imagine that if she could talk, she would tell me how angry she was at me. I tried to be good to her. Lord knows I did. But only the good Lord could tell me if I was truly doing the right thing.
We lived in a building called the San Remo, and though it was simple, I loved it. There were only two real rooms, connected by a long hall, and a small kitchen, tucked away toward the back, with a pink-and-black tiled floor. The apartment was furnished, and, as if by grace, it seemed that there were just exactly the right number of things in it, neat and compact.
I took good care of that baby, better than any nursemaid, and I did everything myself, even down to the dirty diapers that I soaked in a pail with borax and bleach. It gave me pleasure to stand near the sunny window looking at the tree leaves, ironing her tiny bibs and sleep sacks, breathing in the fresh scent of hot, clean linens as I worked. I would push her wicker basket so that a panel of sunlight fell across her, making her fresh flannel blanket look even whiter, her lips pursed in a soft bow while she slept.
But it seemed like before I knew it she was walking, running, back and forth across the wooden floor: Mommy, can we go to the park, can we go outside, can we go for a walk? That girl never stopped chattering, words spilling upon words in her little birdlike voice.
She kept me company with her chatter, which was good since I knew no one. Were it not for our daily conversation with the elevator man as we were coming and going, I would have had no conversation. I was not alone in being a single woman in the building. There were other girls, clean and respectable-looking, who would come and go dressed for work, but maybe we all had stories we didn’t want to tell, as we instinctively kept our distance, limiting our contact to brief nods as we passed.
I confess I lived with a still, small sadness at that time, but I tried to stay busy. Tending to Margaret, who smelled like sweet warm milk, I felt like there was a quiet melody that ran through our days. I listened as I tended to the baby, my eyes on the sun-dappled backs of leaves that fluttered in front of our window. Watching those leaves move in the wind, I thought that was about as close to God as I could get.
There was a school down the street from us, just at the far edge of the park. In the morning, the children used to go into the square brick building in twos and threes and run shouting through the fenced-in play yard. Little Margaret, by the time she could barely sit up in her carriage, loved to pass by the school yard and watch the children. Maybe a baby knows when they’re lonely and feels that absence like an ache, I don’t know. She was tiny, with thin matchstick legs and enormous black eyes, but words flowed out of her mouth thick as prayers from a preacher on a radio show. By the time that child could walk, she learned to talk, without the slightest trace of babyishness in her voice. We would walk by the school in the morning, she and I, and she would say, “Mommy, I want to go to school.” And I would say to her, every morning just the same, “You can’t go to school. You’re not old enough.”
“But, Mommy, how old do I have to be?” And I said to her, “You have to be five to go to school, Margaret, and you’re not five yet, you’re still a baby.”
“I’m not a baby,” she stormed.
“Yes, you’re a baby,” I said, never wise enough to keep my mouth shut.
I wished she didn’t sound so grown-up. I used to watch the other mothers at the park with their children, and I did not see any like Margaret who were so tiny and at the same time so accusatory.
One day in the park, she was playing with another child, a chubby girl with blond wisps of hair and chapped pink cheeks. Margaret was half a head shorter and half the width around, but that voice of hers was always crisp and imperious, not a child’s voice at all. The other girl’s mother, a plain, respectable woman in a green-paisley dress, bent to ask her what grade she was in in school.
“I haven’t started school yet,” Margaret said, her fluted words each crisply enunciated. “I’m too little.”
“She’s four,” I blurted, a little too quickly.
“Oh my,” the woman said, “she sounds so grown-up. I thought she was older.”
My face blushed a deep crimson, and I gripped a little too hard as I dragged Margaret down the sidewalk toward home.
That was the fifth year of our exile, and I wanted to go home. Margaret would never understand exactly why she always seemed so grown-up, because to tell her the truth would be the unraveling of my story. Mercifully, not long after that, Miss Ada died. It was time for me to bring little Margaret home. The two of us left the sunny solitude of our life in the San Remo behind and returned to the big family house on Sycamore Street.
The house was too big for us, built to proportions that were grandiose, not human at all, and haunted by mournful faces of the dead. My mother was sick for several years, and died alone; when the maid saw that she was poorly, the minister was called, but he arrived to find that she had already departed. She never once reached out to me. I felt no animosity toward her, only sadness that circumstances had conspired to make me break her heart.
Margaret and I did not take up much space. We were ill suited to living in the big gloomy rooms whose tall windows were shrouded by heavy curtains, and whose spaces were stuffed with heavy furniture too big for a slight woman and a small child. But the big house had one advantage: it gave us bulk. Never again would we be the object of pity. A woman with a large house and enough money to pay her servants well need not think about pity.
I was not ashamed. I held my head high. On Sunday, I walked straight into the Ironton Congregational Church, my hand gripped tightly around Margaret’s fragile wrist. I wore navy crepe and she wore velvet, and we both walked right down the center of the pews, looking neither right nor left, my eyes shrouded by a little net veil that I had adjusted just so. I paid no attention to the whispers coming from either side. To me, the murmuring was just the sound of lapping waves, of Pine Lake gently ribbing the woody underbrush.
We took our places in the front right pew; we stood up tall to sing the Gloria Patri:
Glory be to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Ghost . . .
And glory be to the mother and to the child.
After that, Margaret and I were home. I took up my church circles and Red Cross and golf, and come the middle of May, I headed off to Wequetona, where I stayed through every summer. I never listened to the whispered gossip that I knew followed us like shadows on a sunny day, and I kept my chin held high.
Before I knew it, that girl was grown up and gone. Margaret and I shared a little piece of a life; not a lifetime, no, not a lifetime at all.
CHAPTER TWELVE
JESS, AGE SEVENTEEN
The days had been glorious. A string one after another of sun-drenched days, each twice as long as a winter day, and three times as bright. Daniel had been reading Indian lore out loud to Jess as they sat on the beach together. The Painter cottage had a wonderful library, shelves and shelves of faded leather-bound books with crumbling bindings and fading gold-leaf titles. Someone in the cottage had collected nature lore. The books were mostly from the twenties, and many had Indian legends and stories in them. There were also a number of illustrated botanicals with detailed descriptions of the local trees. Each day, Daniel would bind up one or
two of the old books in a blue bandanna, and they would carry them down to the secluded part of the beach next to the sinking sand.
Daniel was stretched out on the flat rock, knees bent and head propped on one hand. He was wearing the same faded red shorts that he had on the first day Jess had seen him, the ones that she thought matched his canoe. He was holding the book at an angle that would block the sun, turning the pages occasionally. Jess was lying beside him, eyes closed, facing the sun.
“Listen to this,” Daniel said excitedly, rolling into a sitting position so that he could hold the book more comfortably. “Listen, Jess, this is about the sinking sand. They call it spirit waters.”
Daniel began to read from the crumbling book:
The local people have legends concerning the souls of lake people, who they say can be seen very rarely at the edge of the lake, only in years when the spirits are strong. They call these years spirit years, when along the water’s edge, cold water, like spring water, bubbles up from under the sand. According to the Indian legend, souls of people who have perished in the lake return, bubbling up at the water’s edge, spitting out the cold water that filled their lungs when they drowned so that they can join their ancestor spirits. According to the legend, these spirit years are uncommon, and some souls have to wait for many, many years for the spirit waters to appear. When asked to point to the location, our brave pointed to a spot well out into the water and said that his people say that it is there. He says that the tribal elder is the only one of the tribe who remembers seeing the bubbles. Furthermore, they say that if people use a branch of the giant pine to reach as far as they can down into the sand, that this helps free up the drowned spirits.
“Doesn’t that sound like our sinking sand?” Daniel asked. “Have you ever seen the water level this low? Usually, the waterline goes right up to the trees; that’s at least fifteen feet back. Last summer you couldn’t even see the flat rock, much less the spring.”
Jess looked at Daniel’s face, lit from within with delight. She loved that he could be made so happy by such simple things. Jess felt that her mother had raised her to be world weary and skeptical.
“It’s true that I’ve never seen the water level this low. Mamie says that it hasn’t been like this since the teens. When she was a girl, they used to walk the beach all the way around Loeb Point. It’s never been passable since then.”
Daniel continued reading silently from the book, while Jess stood up, refastening her bathing-suit top, and walked over to the spring in the sand; she tentatively pushed one foot into its center. The sand immediately gave way. When she pulled her lower leg out, it was coated with gray clay all the way to her knee. She stared down into the bubbling sand, and then out across the calm blue water toward Hemingway Point.
“You know,” Jess said, “I actually know of a spirit that might need to be released. My grandmother’s sister drowned in the lake, a long time ago. She was trying to swim across the lake.”
“Right, right, the beautiful girl with the long green hair, the footsteps on the balcony, and the sound of dripping water . . . All the kids on the lake know that story.”
“All the more reason to free her. How’d you like to spend eternity dripping water on Miss Mamie’s balcony? Don’t you think it’s high time we let her out?”
“You’re right,” said Daniel. “Let’s emancipate her. I’ll get a stick.”
Daniel, Jess had noticed, was the kind of guy who always had a pocketknife, even in his bathing-suit pocket. He took it out and cut off a long switch from a slender young pine growing up from the underbrush at the edge of the sand. Jess was surprised to see how easily he was able to strip the bark and twigs off the switch to come up with a long, smooth stick. He made little horizontal cuts along its length, and, down where the branch was a little thicker, carved their initials, J and D.
“Hey, where’d you learn to do that?” Jess said, admiring his effort.
“There used to be an old Indian guy around here, did odd jobs and stuff—he could make almost anything by carving it. Used to make Noah’s arks and wooden blocks and stuff and sell it to tourists in Ironton.”
“Yeah, I remember those.”
“Anyway, I followed him around one summer. He would teach me how to do stuff with the knife if I did some of his work for him. He was weird about the lake too, said one of his brothers drowned and you could hear him screaming in the winter when the ice cracked. Now, that one kind of freaked me out.”
“Maybe we ought to let him out too.”
So Jess and Daniel danced around the bubbling sand, shoving the stick farther and farther down, giggling and chanting, “O spirit of the dead, we liberate you. Spit out your cold water and go to your ancestors.” The sun was high in the sky and the air was still and humid, so finally—hot, damp, and exhausted—they threw themselves into the freezing pool. Because of the underground spring, the sand felt like it collapsed underneath them and they sank as far as their waists. The clay dried on their skin in a layer of sticky gray. Even when they dove into the lake to clean off, the greenish-white powder still stuck in the crevices between their fingers and toes, around the edge of their noses and margins of their faces.
Jess was upstairs, lying across the white bedspread in her room, telling herself she was reading, but the book beside her on the bed was closed. She was tired, so tired that even to open her eyes was an effort, much less to reach over and pick up her book, which felt as though it weighed a thousand pounds. Two days earlier, she had picked up a little test kit in the drugstore, a test kit that showed a little cross.
Was it strange, Jess wondered, that she had to force herself to think about it? That during the normal course of the day, she didn’t think about it at all? In a few days, she was going to be leaving Wequetona, and instead of returning to France, and to her mother, she was going to start college. The whole thing seemed unreal—all of it. She had never visited Texas, and had trouble even picturing it in her mind. She was going to have a baby? Well, it seemed odd, but she figured she would manage—after all, her own mother had done the same.
By contrast, it was easy to think about Daniel, the curve of his back, sliced by the sharp angle of his shoulder blade, the way his hair fell in front of his eyes, his calf muscles so taut that they snapped like rubber bands each time he took a light-footed step. She thought of him standing in the middle of the room with his eyes closed, stereo cranked up, swaying back and forth on the balls of his feet; of the perfect stillness of his crouch as he prepared to photograph a bird far out over the water. She had been avoiding him, telling him she was busy, going into town on pretense, protesting that she was not feeling well, which of course was true. She missed him desperately, with an ache that felt like a bottomless pit. But she did not want to tell him.
But why? This question was gnawing at her as she lay there on the bed, so still that she appeared to be sleeping, because every time she rolled over she felt like she was going to vomit. Why didn’t she want to tell him? She started and restarted in her head: Daniel, I . . . Daniel, I . . . But she never got to the end of her sentence, and in her heart of hearts, she knew exactly why. Because she was afraid that as soon as she told him, it would be over—because she would see the look of disappointment on his face, and she would not be able to love him anymore. Jess could not bear the idea of not loving Daniel anymore, and she ached at the pit of her stomach, an ache that got all mixed up with the acidy, throw-uppy feeling she had, an ache that never seemed to let up at all, even for an instant. She had thought, he had thought, that they would keep this love going, long distance, while they got through college, and that when they got older—because obviously, they were too young and that was a problem. They had found each other, Jess thought, at the wrong moment. And now this.
But there was no doubt in Jess’s mind that she loved this baby. She loved the baby so much that she didn’t want to give Daniel a chance to say that he didn’t
feel the same way. Maybe she would tell him later. But not now. Not until it was too late for anyone to tell her that they didn’t think she should have the baby.
Jess was so lost in her thoughts that she was surprised to hear the tapping of Mamie’s pumps coming up the wooden steps toward the second floor. As a rule, Mamie never approached Jess, but rather, waited until their paths crossed naturally in order to speak to her. So when Jess heard the sound of Mamie’s pumps, she immediately felt uncomfortable, felt as though Mamie’s approach was ominous. A week had now gone by since she’d realized that her period was not going to come. The summer was rapidly drawing to a close. In less than a week, she’d be on her way to college. She was gripped by intense inaction. But, of course, Mamie knew nothing of this. Perhaps, Jess thought, she suspected that Jess was sick. But Jess did not think Mamie would ever guess the truth.
Jess heard three stiff raps on her bedroom door.
“Jess, please open your door. I need to speak to you right now!”
Jess swallowed hard on the acrid bile that she felt rise in her throat as she sat up and opened the door for Mamie, who was dressed in a green-linen suit, pale stockings, and patent-leather pumps. On her lapel was a ruby bumblebee pin. Jess could not read her face—Mamie appeared bent on something, and Jess felt intensely self-conscious, as though she were standing naked at the doorway, although she was fully dressed.